


Blood Bath

by Birdie_Lo_Green



Series: Escapril 2020 Prompt Responses [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Beaches, CPR, Crime Scenes, Drowning, Hannibal (TV) Season/Series 04, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Ocean, Police Procedural, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:13:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24446401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Birdie_Lo_Green/pseuds/Birdie_Lo_Green
Summary: Will takes his relationship with Hannibal over the edge. He once wondered if either of them could survive separation. He sailed across the ocean to express his forgiveness, but will the waters forgive him? Can Hannibal?Written in response to the prompt 'submerged in water' for Escapril on Instagram... but fiction instead of poetry cos that's my jam.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Series: Escapril 2020 Prompt Responses [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765582
Comments: 5
Kudos: 44





	Blood Bath

**MORNING OF THE 10TH: CLIFF HOUSE, CHESAPEAKE BAY, VIRGINIA**

* * *

“What do you hope to find in there?” Clee asked as they arrived.

“I don’t hope,” Jack replied, because he’d lost the ability long before his wife had died, “All I know are best and worst case scenarios.”

“And what exactly are those, sir?”

“Best case,” Jack explained, holding up his fingers, “Two body bags.” Then pressing his forefinger into the thumb, other fingers extending. “Worst case is none.”

Half a dozen cruisers had pulled up to the scene alongside the pair already there. The first had slowed to a park several hundred feet from the rear of the property, whilst the second sat in pride of place out front. An arc of dust signified that the car had veered to a fast and furious stop. The driver side window had been shattered by a single shot and the interior was sprayed red with the remains of dead cops. Looming over the vehicle was a house with saddle shaped roof, flaring front and back into sharp points. Like the prow of a great ship, it’s hull was constructed almost entirely from glass and reflected back both the red and blue lights of emergency and the serenity of a clear blue sky. 

Advancing up the path, Clee’s gun, removed from the holster, hovered at his hip in a double grip, finger at the trigger. Jack walked behind, too overwhelmed by the smell to take in the feats of architecture around them. Nodding directions, rather than remove his hands from his pockets, Jack watched as his team jumped into action: clearing rooms, cordoning and manning perimeters, tagging and bagging evidence and searching for any sign of the perpetrators. Fingerprints, full and partial, were pulled from door handles, wine glasses, a bottleneck (body shattered by a bullet), an FBI issued handgun with a full cylinder, somebody else’s with silencer attached and a bullet missing, and the legs of a grand piano. At its feet a claret stain measuring a yard across marred the pale varnished floor. 

“Blood and bordeaux,” Price explained, crouching to photograph streaks, which showed hands and a struggle to get back to feet. “And a home movie.” Lying as though knocked to the side was an 8mm camera on a knee high tripod. Initially the lens had pointed at whoever had served the wine and bled out before the piano. After the fall the viewfinder took in the shattered far window and back patio where a body was lying. Holding his breath, Jack stepped around the stain, following a dripping trail out to the concrete paving. 

“A gladiatorial blood bath,” Zeller exclaimed, tiptoeing between blood spilt in every variation: sprayed, dripped, gushed, and smeared. The bulk of it pooled at the centre of the courtyard beneath a man whose face drew the breath from Jack’s lungs. 

“The Great Red Dragon has fallen,” Clee said what everybody was thinking, eyes locked with the open ones staring up at them. Dressed all in black, Francis Dolarhyde was lying on his back, left leg bent under the right, arms akimbo as though in flight. Blood stained his nose and mouth and his throat was entirely red, torn open to the trachea with what looked like-

“Teeth,” Zeller said, “He was _bitten_ ...and _gutted_.” The fabric of his shirt had soaked through to the skin, sliced clean at the abdomen and torn open, layers of muscle and intestine visible and stinking. Several feet away were Dolarhyde’s spat out vocal cords, a stack of firewood dyed brown with blood, a hatchet and a hunting knife. Counting and searching as though something was missing, Clee announced:

“Three men, two weapons...“ and Zellar turned to Price with a smirk, whispering:

“Soon to be an internet sensation.” 

“Dolarhyde was unarmed and outnumbered,” Jack said, glaring at the two of them for cracking jokes at a crime scene. The deceased had murdered families in their homes, faked his own death with arson, and slain a dozen officers en route to where he lay now, but he still deserved decorum. His death would be celebrated in the press and Jack too for orchestrating it, but the hunting dogs he’d set loose were missing. Their blood mixed with Dolarhyde’s, red shoes of temptation in three different sizes like the footwork for ballroom dancing. Jack stepped in and out and around trying to follow the action until he came to the edge of the cliff face on which the house was perched. Below freezing waters surged and crashed against the eroding bluff and a rock as wide as two men glittered gold and copper under the rising sun. For once Jack didn’t need a special investigator to interpret the evidence, but he missed him all the same.

“No sign of the suspects,” Clee said, “Nothing taken to suggest going on the run. No blood leading back into the house either.” Jack tore his eyes away from the ocean and stepped back from the edge. The sea breeze pulled through the wool of his coat like a ghost. He felt as though he was standing where they had just been, that Hannibal and Will had been scattered to the wind. “Best case scenario, sir?”

“Have men search the beach,” Jack instructed, walking back towards the house as Clee followed, “Put out an APB on bodies washed up in the bay matching their descriptions. And Jimmy?” Squinting against the sun, the man looked up from photographing Dolarhyde’s boots. “Get the footage from that camera rolling. I need to see it...I have to find Will Graham.”

**EVENING OF THE 9TH: CLIFF HOUSE, CHESAPEAKE BAY, VIRGINIA**

* * *

At first sight all had been light and unfamiliar, calm and placid, horizon stretching out across the Atlantic. Come the last, those same waters swirled dark and frantic, lapping up the cliff face to devour them. Standing together at the precipice, Hannibal breathlessly confessed:  
"This is all I ever wanted for you, Will." His ‘this’ was not the bloodshed or the adrenaline of killing, but the companionship, the hesitant hand at Will's hip, their faces close enough to kiss. There on the windswept cliffs, Will clung to Hannibal, a toehold and a hook, and recounted all of the times they might have touched. The last time Will had been unconscious and Hannibal was the only real thing, separating him from the cold and the dark, the end. This time Will had control over his mind and limbs, and he used them to admit to things once denied.

"It's _beautiful_ ..." he’d replied, and his ‘it’ was not the house glowing like a boat in the black or the panoramic views of an obsidian ocean, but the full moon feeling of working _with_ Hannibal rather than against him. Together they’d killed a man, a beast, who had come to feast upon them and film the slaying. He was stronger, faster, hungrier and yet the second the Dragon was outnumbered the line between self defence and murder had blurred. Still he’d lunged and stabbed and torn at them. The blood of three men dripped like a Pollock painting until one went down and two stood up - the last man and his shadow at the end of everything. Camera rolling, Hannibal held firm for the two of them, gripping Will by his clothes. Pressed in close, Will listened to Hannibal’s rapidly beating heart. He looked down at the ocean crashing relentlessly against the eroding bluff, gathered the last of his strength and pushed.

A storm of black and blue in a vacuum, the way down was a hurricane. Wind whistling, warping shirts to skin,Hannibal pressed their lips together, and though Will gave himself over, instead of tongue, Hannibal gifted Will the air from his own lungs. Vision blurred with tears, Will’s grip tightened around Hannibal and his last thought before they hit the water was that he’d killed him. Luckily there were no rocks at the bottom of Will’s intuition. The water swallowed them whole, filling and emptying. There was no up or down, no right or wrong, no Will or Hannibal, only flailing and roaring. Hands were torn from him, and Will was taken under and over everything that had happened. 

"All I ever wanted...was _you_ , Will." Hannibal’s last words came back, distorted by the waves battering Will’s eardrums. He’d gone to prison so that Will could always find him. In his absence Will had tried a hand at living, loving, forgetting, but they’d been drawn together again as though one was the other's phantom limb. Working as one, they’d survived the wrath of Mason Verger and the insatiable hunger of the Red Dragon. If not the raw power of the ocean, Will thought, what was left for them to survive, but each other? He was still wearing his wedding ring.

“Can’t live with him, can’t live without him,” Hannibal’s smirking psychiatrist had once told Will. 

“Is Hannibal... _in love_ with me?” Will had asked her, dragging the words from his throat like a cannula. Her response had been two questions, the first of which she'd answered.

“Could he _daily_ feel a _stab_ of _hunger_ for you, and find _nourishment_ at the very _sight_ of you? _Yes_ …” Whilst the second: “But do you _ache_ for him?” had long been left hanging and it was only having lost Hannibal that Will could feel the agony of not knowing where to go looking.

Kicking hard against the swirling currents fit to drown him, Will's head broke the surface. The moon glowed above, surrounding stars like porcelain. Swallowing salt and blood, Will turned and swam in the direction of the beach. By the time he reached it, his body was failing. The adrenaline that had saved him receded as quickly as the ocean. Shirt stained pink and stuck to him, Will felt newborn. Pressing a hand to the stab wound in his chest, his lungs had been spared the blade, and yet when he took his first breath in a world without Hannibal, it choked him. All he could see for miles around was sea and sand and sky, a boat and the shape of a body lying unmoving. 

Running and then falling, Will stopped short of the washed up corpse of a stag. The creature had been with him since the beginning. Now it was dying and Hannibal was lying with eyes shut, chest still, lips parted. Will had seen him sleeping just the once, sitting at the bedside of Abigail Hobbs. At the time he’d thought Hannibal looked like one of his rescue dogs. In hindsight he suspected Hannibal’s dozing had been a pretence meant to soften Will’s defences. If Hannibal was pretending now, he was the best actor Will had ever seen. In so many dreams he had wrapped his hands about Hannibal’s throat and squeezed. Now he checked for vitals and thought: _please, please, please_ .

So often the voice in his head had been Hannibal’s. All Will could hear now was his own desperate begging, his own heart beating. Opening Hannibal’s mouth, he inserted two fingers in case of obstruction. Finding none, he continued to press his thumbs up at Hannibal's jaw, beneath either ear, and tilted his head back. Lowering himself over him, he pinched Hannibal’s nose closed with one hand, pressed their lips together and gently started blowing. The seconds passed into minutes and there was nothing, nothing but the lapping of the ocean and Will's own breathing. Performing CPR, he locked his hands, pumping and counting. Arms fatiguing and bleeding from his face and chest, he leaned in to issue two final deep breaths. Exhaling once and then twice to no avail, he realised that Hannibal's ship had sailed. Will would never hear him say anything pretentious or insightful ever again. Head ringing with their past conversations, Will looked out towards the ocean, considering diving back in. _We’re orchestrations of carbon. You and me. And Jack. And Jack. All our destinies flying and swimming in blood and emptiness._ Then Hannibal coughed, seawater and vomit expelled into Wills lap. 

Lungs burning, mouth bitter with bile and salt, Hannibal’s eyes adjusted after so long in darkness. Washed clean of sweat and blood, Will’s face hovered above him and he was smiling. _Was it good to see me? Good? No._ There was a tear trembling at the reddened rim of his left eye and the hair which usually hid his large, impish ears hung now in thin dripping rings. _You were supposed to leave. We couldn’t leave without you._ Lips warm with the ghost of his, Hannibal reached up to brush the scar on Will’s forehead. He’d once cut into him with a buzzsaw. Hand slipping, Will held him at the wrist, over the scars he’d left there, comforted by the weak drumming of his pulse. _Even stevens._ Tasting each other’s medicine had come close enough to killing them. Hannibal’s breaths came in short bursts, chest bruised by Wills efforts.

“Will…” Hannibal rasped, barely audible and Will nodded. “You’re sending...very mixed signals.” 

“So long as you’re receiving,” Will sighed, breathing returning slowly to normal.

“Always,” Hannibal sighed, “Loud and clear...” The moon shone above them like the bottom of an empty cup. The one Hannibal had smashed had come together, but he was falling apart. Will had once crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat to tell him that he was forgiven. _If I saw you everyday forever, Will, I would remember this time._ Hannibal had assured him that some of their stars would always be the same and they were steeped in those stars now. 

"Hannibal..." Chiyoh was standing behind them, hunting rifle levelled at Will’s head. She had shot things dead that had more life left in them. She had also seen everything. Hannibal had invited her to watch his end, but forbidden any intervention. She deserved closure he’d told her, but the truth was that he enjoyed the idea of her taking pleasure from a murder. Her anguished expression told him that she was still an obedient bystander who lacked the guts for putting pitiful men out of their misery. 

"Watching you die...was not so satisfying,” she said, out of breath as though she’d run all the way down from the cliff house. “Seeing you saved leaves me broken." 

"You have the power...to erase our resurrection,” Hannibal’s words left Will’s mouth. 

“Roll the stone back over the cave and walk away?” Chiyoh knew no retreat.

Years ago they’d ridden an express train together from Hannibal’s home of Lithuania all the way to Florence. Sharing one cabin, Will had taken the upper bunk and her voice had drifted upwards, soft and slow like incense. 

“If you don’t kill him,” she’d said, a statement, not a question, “You’re afraid you are going to become him.”

“Yes,” Will had replied, distressed by the prospect of slipping into Hannibal’s skin. Chiyoh had said Hannibal's departure made taxidermy out of her, but she simply wasn’t as easy to pose as Will. Last he’d seen her she’d been standing at the back of the train, hair curled, lips and eyes painted, silk gown hanging open to her breast bone.

“I like the night,” she’d explained, “It’s more than a period of time. It’s another place. It’s different from where we are during the day.” 

“We’re different from who we are during the day,” Will had agreed, “Little more hidden, little less seen.” 

“When life is most like a dream…” Chiyoh had sighed wistfully and Will had asked her _why_ she was searching for Hannibal, what exactly she hoped to find - mostly because he could have done without the competition. There had been a sizable bounty on Hannibal’s head back then. Chiyoh had insisted she hadn’t come looking for Hannibal, that she knew exactly where he was. When asked why she’d kept information from him, Chiyoh had stepped closer to Will.

“There are means of influence other than violence,” she’d whispered, leaning in close to kiss him. She’d described Hannibal as a cub she played with until he became a big cat. Under her lips Will had felt like the tame version that tourists snapped holiday pics with. Chiyoh had drawn back to look at him, saying: 

“But violence is what you understand.” Then she’d thrown Will from the back of the train. Finding Hannibal again in Florence, Will couldn't be sure that the scope of her rifle wasn't focussing in on them. When he'd tried to stab Hannibal, she'd shot him through the shoulder. Now she was lowering her gun and slinging it over her back. She had once sworn to watch over Hannibal and she was adept at watching. Taking one of Hannibal’s arms, she helped Will to carry him towards a dock where a small yacht was moored. Quoting something Will had said to her in Lithuania, she whispered into Hannibal's ear what could have been a comfort or a threat:

‘All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story.’ This cannot be how your story ends.” 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> My partner really wants me to continue with this. I just doubt my ability to seem cultured enough to even write Hannigram, but I imagine if I did there'd be: island hopping, dog theft and the brutal artsy killing of criminals who prey upon women and children...


End file.
